The Pursuit
by Nonakani
Summary: /Twoshot, Abbey-centric/  Even when left to it's own devices - even when Fassad is absent and the villagers have chance to make their own decisions - Tazmily will change.
1. Part 1

_**The Pursuit (of happiness)**_

_Even left to its own devices,_

_Tazmily will change._

_(This is the tale of those_

_who raised their hands first.)_

_Part 1.  
_

_

* * *

_

This isn't the first time she had woken up pale, sweating, her heart pounding as though it had been ruptured; she saw herself impaled by that drago fang in the place of a half-forgotten shade, her own terrifying nightmare.

For a whole, impossibly long minute, Abbey couldn't move. The imaginary fang held her down to her bed, pierced through flesh and heart and mattress, until she assured herself that it was only a dream.

Maybe the drago, that drago and its fang, was also an illusion, a monster from out of her imagination, something that crawled out of a fear she'd never even known she had.

Abbey finally turned over, fear gone enough that she could breathe and hear more than her heartbeat in her ears, and sat up on her bed with her bare feet lightly touching the hardwood floor. Abbot, next to her, turned in his sleep. Abbey wondered if her husband also dreamt of drago fangs.

Her toes curled at the cool sensation of removing her covers. A shiver, and then she stood up, walked across the room, and turned the Happy Box on.

Even months after the monkey had delivered it, after Mr. Fassad wove his tale of fortune and happiness, the Happy Box still seemed foreign. But Abbey had stopped questioning how it worked, just as everybody else had – it made them happy just as it was supposed to, and having one in your home repelled the lightning, and wasn't that enough? With the press of a button, the screen blared to life, glowing bright in the darkness.

The blinking light, a constant strobe of flashes, reduced the nighttime house to highlights and shadows: the back half of everything, uncast in light, was swallowed by the dark. There were no dragos. There was no forest on fire, no forest at all, no Tazmily or Nowhere Islands or endless ocean beyond them. Abbey leaned in closer to the Happy box without even realizing it – half of her was gone, too, and it must have left her unbalanced.

Abbey, for just a little while, felt happy; when she finally returned to bed, her dreams were contently blank. No drago's roar disturbed her.

#

A ruckus from the town awoke Abbey hours after dawn, a rustling unease she could feel even from beyond her walls. Abbot had already left the house, either forgetting or trying and failing to wake her, which filled Abbey with curiosity and a little bit of worry.

He hadn't been the same since that night six months ago, the night that she had to carry her husband home on her back. They had been a procession, a silent group carrying the victims of a righteous and misplaced wrath, the prelude to a funeral. And Abbot had been fine: but his head had been wrapped for the whole week after, and even now his eyes sometimes wandered and his words sometimes slurred together.

Abbey dressed quickly, tying the stem of a red flower to her headband. She grabbed a half-loaf of day-old nut bread and devoured it greedily as she opened her door, the day before her bright.

A crowd had gathered in Tazmily's square. They circled around a central point in much the same way as they did when Mr. Fassad would preach of happiness, but everybody mulled amongst themselves in various volumes of unrest. Abbey tried her best to weave through them, apologizing at every bump and misplaced step, until she heard a distinct, booming voice as she reached the crowd's center:

"I don't know about all of you, but I can't take much more of this!"

It was Bronson, his baritone always recognizable. He stood on an upside-down Happy Box crate, sturdy under his weight, which made him two heads higher than his audience. Abbey watched him from between the front row's shoulders; the stout man commanded total attention.

"I'm sick of all of it – sick as many others, I'm sure. But what happens if we sit around and let events take hold? Nothing!" Several villagers nodded, and several others voiced their agreement. Abbey, meanwhile, looked through the crowd for someone calm enough to explain to her what exactly had happened. She spotted Bateau, just to her right, and she pushed again through the crowd to reach him.

"Bateau!"

He turned, glasses reflecting the midmorning sun. He had never proven himself unreliable. Abbey trusted his word.

"Bateau, what happened?" Bateau leaned in close so that Abbey could hear him over the roaring crowd, the murmuring of so many voices.

"Lightning struck somewhere last night – scared my birds real good, too." He whispered almost conspiratorially. "Not sure where, though. Only Isaac was awake, and he's the one that saw the flash."

Abbey's heart panged with worry. While lightning was hardly an unusual occurrence anymore, each tale of a lightning strike struck just as much through Abbey as anybody else.

"But get this: sometime after, there was a drago at the Crossroads."

Abbey could have fallen to her knees.

"I haven't gotten a chance to see the exact damage yet, but I heard it was really bad. And it's gotten everybody worked up."

He motioned upwards at Bronson, who was still ranting animatedly. Abbey decided to put all of her attention on what was happening in the center of the circle, if only as a distraction from the sudden phantom pain in her chest.

She tuned back in to Bronson's words. "...do something."

Abbey had missed most of what was said, but Bronson's chest moved up and down with heavy breaths. The crowd, again, had erupted in whispers and sideways glances.

"And what do we do?" Isaac came out of the crowd, speaking to Bronson directly. "Lightning that strikes without thunder following it... It's unnatural. What's happening is beyond any of us, for sure."

Bronson jumped down off the crate. "Then do we just watch as out houses are destroyed? Our village? Our _ifamilies_?"

Realization dawned on Isaac's face; he knew exactly what Bronson was referring to.

"You live in the Sunshine Forest. You know, more than any of us, how dangerous things have gotten."

"That's why I'm saying _there's nothing we can do-_"

"There is, if we work as a group! Right now, Tazmily is hardly united." Bronson, though not on the crate, heart-shaped emblem inverted like an arrowhead, spoke out to the crowd, who forced themselves in to silence.

"We look at our neighbor's house and see it crumbling, destroyed. We think: 'That was not me.' We are grateful that we had a Happy Box while that person did not. There are those that _have_ and those that _have not_. But we should all be those who _have_! We all have the right to safety, to sleeping at night without lightning flashing through our windows and roars ringing in our ears."

Cheering; the crowd was singular. Even Isaac seemed to agree, fallen to Bronson's reason. Bronson returned to his spot on the crate, unquestioned.

"Tazmily Village should be happy."

For a moment, Abbey looked up and saw Mr. Fassad in Bronson's place, the two of them suddenly so similar, shapes transposed over the other. Inspiring, empathetic. A bringer of happiness.

A ripple ran through the crowd – the topic of discussion, now, was what the source of all their problems could be. Neighbor turned to neighbor, a unity unseen since six months prior. Something fluttered through Abbey as she saw her husband's hat somewhere in the crowd.

Happiness existed. Happiness was possible. It must have been like blooming flowers, only visible in the right season.

Somebody broke through the inner rim of the circle: Biff, his look of elation obvious.

"Guys! Guys! Hey, everybody! I think I've got it!"

He sprung in to the center of his newfound audience. He didn't stand on Bronson's crate, but was tall enough to be seen by everybody, regardless.

"Maybe," he said, turning to look at all of them, "the dragos _make_ the lightning!"

Everybody there was struck numb. And then-

"Pffft! Ha!" Abbey couldn't tell who started laughing first, but soon the entire collective roared with Biff's hilarious recommendation. Only Bronson still looked solemn, as if he perhaps saw something that none of them noticed. A way for the two events to overlap.

"H-hear me out!" said Biff. "Let me explain what I mean!"

One by one, the villagers calmed themselves, but the occasional snicker still broke through the noise of light wind and ever-present apprehension.

"Lightning strikes, and then a drago attacks the Crossroads." Biff sounded completely serious. "It was after dragos got violent that lightning started striking, though! Dragos were always calm before, friendly, even, and lightning didn't hit houses, either. There has to be at least some kind of connection!"

"He has a point," said Bronson. Again, the crowd threw around the idea, small at first, until it grew, like a baby drago in to an adult, in to the most likely explanation.

"Of course! Lightning from cloudless skies can't be the same as normal lightning!"

"If they happen at the same time, it makes sense, right?"

"I can't think of any other explanation."

Biff beamed, as if Mayor Pusher had made him mayor for a day, or Mr. Fassad had praised him as a positive example.

"And dragos can breathe fire, too!" And lightning can cause fires," - Tazmily had seen enough of that to know it was true - "so it totally works! Flint knows; he fought a drago. He's the one who told us! If anybody can fight a drago again, Flint-"

Isaac put a hand on Biff's shoulder. "Stop, Biff. Nobody wants to talk about that."

"It's true, though! He-"

"All of you are being idiots."

Speak of the devil.

The crowd parted, and Flint emerged from the sea of people, his hands clenched in to fists. The crowd undulated and spread away from where he stood, leaving a path out of the village. They were scared to step in the shadows of his footsteps. Flint, Tazmily's pariah, scared everybody else in to silence with hardly a word, just by standing before them.

"Flint..." Isaac's arms went slack.

Abbey looked around at the sobered mass.

Again, she found her husband. He was seething, just to see Flint there. Abbot hid it well enough, enough that nobody around him spared him a glance. But Abbot was her husband, and Abbey knew that were she close enough to him, she would have been able to trace the lines of anger on his face, to offer him a sturdy hand to calm his own, shaking.

Abbey's forehead pounded with sympathy, in time with her heartbeat.

"What're you going on about? Fighting dragos? Running off in to the mountains, the lot of you? It's a fool's mission, and a fool's death."

Abbey stared. She wondered if he saw his son's receding figure in the eyes of the crowd.

Bronson motioned to speak, but it was Abbot whose outburst was heard, his anger exploding out and painting his cheeks red with fury. Even Flint, in all his measured cruelty, looked taken aback.

"An' so what if we are! Who're you to tell us how to handle ourselves?" Flint said nothing, not even forming a retort on the thin line of his scowl. Abbot's slur was particularly pronounced.

Abbot tried to speak, but his words got caught somewhere between being thought and spoken, as they sometimes did since the last time he had spoken to Flint face to face without Abbey beside him to calm him, his hand in hers, and what must have been a terrible, hidden hatred.

Abbey moved towards them; Abbot might take Flint's silence as a challenge.

She came up behind him just as he was about to pounce, twisting her arms around him so that he couldn't thrash out of her grip. He struggled for a full minute in Abbey's embrace, barely a meter from knocking Flint upside the head.

Though Abbot's body finally calmed, his eyes still watered with frustrated tears and sparked as if lit by reignited embers. Or lightning.

"...You hate dragos more than any of us. You have the _right_ to." He said it, looking at Flint yet not looking at Flint, the rage still present in half-combined words.

Flint adjusted his hat. For just a second – maybe Abbey imagined it, or maybe part of her still wanted to believe Flint was more than just personified wrath – she thought she saw the trails of past tears dried down on his cheeks.

"All of my hatred has dried up."


	2. Part 2

_**The Pursuit (of happiness)**_

_"Six months...huh?_

_I wonder if it's been long enough_

_to see a change in that hole-in-the-ground village._

_Nwehehehehe!"_

_Part 2.  
_

* * *

Tazmily dispersed in to its smallest parts again, almost all the fight in them gone.

Abbey sat on one side of the bed, and Abbot on the other. Neither spoke, but Abbey could feel the displacement of the sheets as Abbot turned to face her. Abbey didn't want to look him in the eye. But she did.

Immediately, his eyes darted to the left. More oppressive, weighty silence crushed down on the mattress like a flat iron.

"'M sorry," he finally said.

Abbey crawled over the bed and, knees digging in to the sheets, embraced her husband from behind. He stiffened, for just a moment, before he shook and started to sob.

"I... I can't stand it! It's like... Like..."

"Shhh," said Abbey. "You don't need to talk. It's fine."

They could talk without words, if they really tried. Even Abbot, endlessly terrified of his lost language, his rage too similar to the man who lost almost everything. Even Abbey, who had been neglecting to water the flowers.

They sat there in a single shape for what felt like years before the two of them dared to move. Abbey looked to the corner of the room. The flowers were wilting.

She turned on the Happy Box, and both spend the entire day cuddled between sheets, and both felt better by the time night finally, gratefully fell and both husband and wife fell asleep.

#

Abbey was awoken again by noise.

The knock at the door was indistinct, Abbey only half conscious. They pounded in her head like a drago's footfalls.

She crawled unwilling out of the space between Abbot's arms, out of warmth and in to the chill of the night. Her sleeping gown wavered as though a breeze had caught her, pushing her toward the door.

She was met immediately with Thomas's familiar gaze, but he looked strangely somber. Never before had she seen him so calm.

"Sorry to bother you so early, Abbey."

Early? Abbey looked over Thomas's shoulder at the sky. It was still dark. The sun had yet to rise over the skyline of mountains and trees, over the line of houses that separated the village from the Crossroads, over the cliff at the edge of the cemetery.

"What happened?" Abbey almost whispered, too tired to properly speak.

"Everybody's gathering in the center of the village again. _Bronson's_ gathering everybody. Just came to tell you that y'all need to get out there. Big things are happening."

So, Bronson again. Abbey nodded. "I'll wake Abbot, and we'll come as soon as we're properly dressed."

Thomas grinned, smaller than it should have been. It was a wavering, forced smile, that only lasted for an instant. Abbey turned and was about to close the door behind her when Thomas grabbed the outside doorknob.

"Wait. One more thing." Abbey spun to face him.

"What is it?"

"Bring something with you that you can defend yourselves with."

Thomas was off before he could even see Abbey's expression, gaping. Urgency awoke her. She shook Abbot awake and retold the quickly spun tale of Thomas's words, and both of them shared a long, meaningful look before making themselves decent.

Abbot found a chair leg in the corner of the house, from the kitchen chair he had meant to fix weeks ago. The wood was firm, and didn't bend when he pulled both ends of it in opposite directions, testing it.

The crowbar Abbey had found felt heavy in her hands.

They ran to the center of the village, the well falling in to disrepair. Abbey could see and recognize almost everybody – all the adults were gathered there, wielding sticks and torches and even knives. But everybody looked deadly; They had taken on Flint's wrath in his absence, and their faces taken on lines of age in the place of the village's elderly, all likely left asleep.

Bronson, again, was at the center of everything. He was lit upwards by torches, making him seem far larger than in reality, and he held in his hands a lethal-looking pitchfork.

Behind him was a crippled creature.

Abbey couldn't see, from where she was, the exact condition of the monster. But the drago let out no cries as Bronson kicked it aside, a corpse left before them as an example. Abbey couldn't look away, shaking as she held her husband's sleeves with a grip like death. Green scales were red with blood in splatters, blotches, red like a dead woman's dress.

Bronson's face was painted with red, which might have been the adrenaline still caught in his cheeks, but might have been blood. "See," he said, calm despite what he must have just done. "I handled myself just fine."

"B-but, why..."

"It was wandering around the Crossroads! It was almost at the village gate! I did what I had to do."

They had never seen a drago corpse before. Abbey, despite her fear, was drawn to it and inched closer to where Bronson was displaying the body.

"See? You see? It was vulnerable right there, behind the neck, and just under the ribcage..." He prodded at it. "We can do it, you see? I wasn't wrong after all."

Abbey did see. She stared.

"So," said Isaac in the crowd, "You did it. You killed it."

"I did."

"You _killed_ it."

"Are you wrong in the head? I said already that it was me."

Abbey wanted to go back in to her house, to crawl under the bed sheets and never emerge, but Abbot still stared at not the Drago, but Bronson and his blood-coated hands. He looked more like a butcher than a blacksmith.

He again addressed the crowd. "It was going to waltz right in to Tazmily! Eat all our food and any of us stupid enough to leave their doors unlocked! We've seen enough horrible things these last six months. I can't take this. I can't stand this fear, this pressing, terrifying, unbearable knowledge that something so capable of murder sleeps so _close_."

He looked sincere. Bronson's voice had not lost volume, and the entire crowd heard the confession of his plight. And everybody agreed. Abbey's grip on her crowbar tightened.

"Would _you_ accept it? Would _you_ stand there and watch, stand there as something like _that_ approached you?"

No, thought Abbey. She would have run, screaming, calling out the name of anyone that could possibly help her. _Ran behind her with stomping footsteps, carved its location in to the dirt, piercing cries and lightning bolts and fangs._

"All I want is the safety of this village, our longevity," said Bronson. "And if you agree, follow me in to the Sunshine Forest, follow me to the Drago Plateau." His grip was white and icy on his weapon.

She didn't know, didn't understand why everyone was cheering, why _she_ was cheering. It was an angry, feral cheer. Rage, and the villagers of Tazmily drew their arms up high.

They marched.

Out of Tazmily, where half of the buildings were being rebuilt. Newer wood and strange shapes, plaster and tiles. Houses struck to ashes next to houses re-erected.

But the Crossroads sucked the voices out of them. It was not so much that the place had fallen in disrepair, but that nobody had dared decide what to rebuild from the day before. Even the dirt had been left untouched, though a day had passed, and the signature mark of a drago's claws – three long streaks carved in to the dirt like birds skidding on the ground after being forced from flight – carved the landscape in to a flurry of alien patterns.

The old bell tower had finally fallen, though they planned on tearing it down eventually, regardless.

Like when they left the forest in silence six months ago, they now entered in silence. Bronson looked back at them a final time; Abbey wondered if that was sorrow on his face, or a trick of the shadows. His scowl was too big for tears.

The forest, too, was silent as death.

Abbey could hear something, though, like thumping soft in her eardrums, and moved a hand to her chest to find that it was her heartbeat. She took a steady breath to calm herself, which did little good at all. The crowbar brushed freezing against the bare portion of her arm. It was icy as the night.

The villagers looked around them wearily-

A tree moved, a bush shook-

And something crawled out of the brush.

The forest had been almost entirely abandoned by man those last six months. But Isaac knew. He had seen them. Writhing, terrible, screeching creatures of strange shapes and even stranger actions.

They followed the smell of Flint's anger in to the forest, it seemed. Strife, perhaps, was what the monsters fed on.

Abbey stood still as a tree herself as the rest of the village moved in unison. They were surrounded. Every inch of the forest had become suddenly malevolent, and so did the people of Tazmily.

Abbey's knuckles were white around the crowbar, and she held it close as she dodged people lumbering about, chasing after creatures with total disregard for the world around them. She backed in to a tree as something splattered in the distance.

A hiss-

Abbey turned. She spun, holding her crowbar out, moving on instinct and instinct alone and the trees blurred around her and she saw in her mind the children of the village hitting a ball with a stick and she felt something pierce through her chest. Moved in fractures of images, strobe lights like a flickering Happy Box screen.

Her crowbar, hitting true as a weapon should, pinned the creature, small but violent, to the tree. "Slitherhen," she had heard Isaac name it, and the name was as appropriate of anything: the body was that of the forest's native snakes, but the head of a rooster had been sewn on to it like a helmet over the creature's actual head.

But it was real. It squawked, living, as she pushed it in to the tree, splattering it, now so suddenly dead. Its eyes almost popped out of its skull, and it coughed up blood with a final shriek. Its blood seemed to seep out of its reptilian pores, but too fast to be natural. The creature, surprisingly fragile, left a mark of crimson more vibrant than a dress dyed red on the tree, on the crowbar which seeped on to Abbey's hands.

She wiped at an itch on her face. When had her mouth stretched in to a grin? She left a thin trail of blood on her cheek.

There was something inside of her. A rush of adrenaline, or maybe excitement, that caused her to stare at the mess for only a moment instead of an eternity before running back to the crowd. Blood, still wet, dripped off the crowbar and on to her shoes, slid down the metal and across her arms. She couldn't smell it anymore.

The villagers fought their way through the rest of the forest.

She only saw glimpses of her husband, the mass of people so large and tumultuous that nobody was really themselves alone. He was as blood-covered as her, as was Bronson, and Isaac and even Biff and Bateau and Jill and everybody else. For a long minute, her husband's hat looked a lot like Flint's.

Bats that hovered over them were hit to the ground. Slitherhens were splattered in to the dirt, half buried by their shuffling footsteps as they disregarded the corpses. Baked Yammonsters were crushed to pulp, their eyes the only parts of the vegetable-like creatures that bled. Flying Mice learned quickly to flee, though very few escaped.

A glint of light fluttered above the trees when they finally stepped out of the trees and on to the hard ground of the Plateau.

Alec's house, there, had always stood as a landmark on the Plateau. It stood on the edge of the cliff, overlooking a beautiful view of the inner parts of the island as well as the particular part of the Plateau where the dragos were best known to sleep.

But as the villagers, more mob than man, reached where the house should be, they saw only a blackened pile. The ashes were so recent that they still blew off when the wind dared to blow.

And Alec himself stood before them, the sun behind him. It glinted off his glasses just so, so that Abbey couldn't see his expression. His mouth, drawn in to a thin line, seemed to best imitate Flint's scowl.

Abbey shivered. Alec's black suit, still mourning, was as pitch dark as the night had been.

The crowd only continued to march, and Abbey lagged to the back of the line. Her hands still shook, blood both rushing to them and flecking them externally, and she felt the dried smear on her cheek. Her hand then moved to her chest, where her heart was furiously pounding, like waking from bad dreams.

"Get out of the way, Alec," said Bronson, his voice carrying. He sounded civil despite his appearance; Bronson looked like he had left his civility behind him in the forest, hair disheveled and clothes worn and torn by the trip through the Sunshine Forest. It made Abbey look down on herself: her clothes, as well, looked as though she had crawled right out of the earth.

Alec said nothing, at first.

"Get out of the way, Alec!" Bronson repeated.

"...I know what you plan on doing," said Alec at last. "Have you even thought this through?"

"What is there to think about? The Drago Plateau is _right there_-"

"Look for a minute."

Alec's head turned to the Plateau.

"They may be dragos, yes, but they are families the same as yours. All of this hatred...it isn't worth it. It isn't worth so many lives."

The crowd only mulled for a second. Bronson, their leader, motioned then that they keep walking. As they approached the Plateau and what was left of Alec's house, wood for rebuilding just starting to pile up by the ashen fixture, blowing smoke off the mountainside like an active volcano, Bronson stepped around the footprints of a drago.

"It's their fault, Alec! You know that! Everything! All this sadness! You must hate them too – as much as me, or even Flint! Don't you resent them at all? Your... Your _daughter-_"

"Of course I do!"

The villagers were now just before Alec and his house. The Plateau was right in front of them, just a short walk away. Bronson had stopped in front of Alec, and was already holding him up by his collar by the time he spoke.

"How can't I? Every day, I hear the cries of creatures just like the one that..." Alec coughed, age apparent in his failing voice. "But it's not the fault of an entire species. The one that did all of _that_ was different. I saw it. It was _changed_, somehow. Made in to a real monster."

Abbey, from the back of the crowd, thought that all of them must have changed, just enough to be there now. Maybe they were all monsters, or maybe they were the only things that could stop monsters now.

A brief reflection of what Bronson was before the previous day flashed there, but then was gone. "We have to stop them, then," he almost whispered. "We have to stop them before any more monsters can be made."

Alec's glasses had almost fallen off his nose, enough that his eyes, widening, were visible. "That's just self-justification! What you plan on doing is hardly anything noble! You_-"_

Bronson yelled.

It was a cry, something almost animalistic, and was just enough to spur the villagers in to action again. The villagers mirrored it, raising their weapons. Abbey raised her weapon as high as she could, caught totally in the moment and also hoping that Abbot could see where she was by the glint of metal and red off her crowbar.

Bronson threw Alec to the ground and they moved again toward the Plateau, _so close_. Abbey, completely focused on the dip in the cliffs ahead, the home and the shelter and the nest of fangs, thought she might have kicked something with her feet as she passed.

Her heart felt as though it had been rended long ago, even, a phantom pain that she hadn't quite healed.

As they stepped on to the flat expanse of rock, Bronson raised a hand and motioned for the crowd to be silent. They complied without question.

They saw no dragos at first, their wariness perhaps an artifact of knowing the hatred directed at them. Or did the monsters fear their deaths?

As the villagers entered the center of the Plateau, the dragos emerged. Green scales, whipping tails and, most importantly of all, large fangs. Despite the sudden urgency of the situation, Abbey's only thought was that there were a lot less adult dragos than she had expected there to be.

A roar, and Abbey wasn't sure if it were man or beast that made it. And she was suddenly in the eye of a tornado of chaos.

Small groups formed haphazardly together, David versus Goliath. They hit the dragos, aiming for tender spots and gaps between scaly frames, they screamed and shook and bludgeoned and found every possible way to cause them harm.

Abbey stood still. She wanted to find her husband.

One drago, an adult, roared fiercely at a small collective before snapping its terrible jaws, only to be hit from behind by Bronson himself, who had snuck on to the creature's back to deal a killing blow. He pierced it and, in withdrawing his weapon, blood spurted from its wound like a fountain.

Abbey wondered why she was backing away. She couldn't describe or explain it.

Somebody had brought a rope, she saw, and several people beat together on a adolescent drago, tied up as a temperamental bull might, as its cries grew weaker and weaker. Something seeped in to the dirt, moistening the dry soil of the Plateau. Something was soft now under Abbey's feet.

Abbot, his face contorted with anger and excitement and passion and sorrow and joy and every emotion Abbey could describe with words and several she could not, smashed something over the head. The drago must have been an infant, and even the crown of its skull was delicate. It folded around the chair leg like tissue or mud, though the wood cracked in two in the process. The crack drew Abbey in to a wall.

She wondered what that strange, longing, painful, retching feeling in the pit of her stomach was, and where it had come from.

She wondered why she felt like she had taken the place of someone else, stabbed through the heart by drago fangs and fear and both things intermixed.

Abbey was unhappy.

And something moved out of the corner of her eye.

The drago was another infant. Its color was that of fresh grass, yellow streaks like sunlight down its belly. It's roar was hardly terrifying; Its fangs were small.

Abbey walked at it, staggering, and the drago backed away. Its tail brushed against the sheer side of the cliff behind them, and soon it could back away no more.

The drago let out a weak, heartfelt cry.

Abbey raised her arms, and with them, her crowbar.

Arms shaking, knees trembling under her dress.

No longer could she feel the crust of the dried blood on her cheek, though she knew it was still there.

And as she raised her weapon high above her head, the rising sun glinting off it, the light from behind her cast her shadow on the wall before her, her shadow and the drago's shadow transposed over each-other. The shape of them made her look as if something was lodged in her chest.

And she wondered, "Why can't I be happy?"


End file.
